The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Book Review: ‘Generative Scribing” by Kelvy Bird

Generative Scribing by Kelvy Bird is truly beautiful and essential reading for anyone who works with other humans to visualize complex systems and generate useful dialog and insight.

I have known Kelvy since I started scribbling on whitewalls over 20 years ago. She has been an inspiration to many of us with her kind, thoughtful, self-deprecating, and soulful personality. 

Unlike the typical how-to doodle book, drawing manual or resource guide, Generative Scribing is written more in the spirit of the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.

...or the German Bauhaus color theorist Joseph Albers.

...or perhaps, written by fellow Massachusetts Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. (spoiler alert: there is a beautiful scene involving Walden Pond during the 2017 solar eclipse.)

Kelvy succinctly lays out the brief history of scribing, which she has made publicly available online, and makes a generous nod to other friends and practitioners in the field.

Anyway, if you are in the world of group facilitation and visualizing ideas, get Kelvy's book for your bookshelf, backpack, or bedside.

(This is not a paid promotion, BTW. I am simply proud, honored and amazed by Kelvy's work.)

Kelvy and members of this international tribe—including Alfredo Carlo of Italy, Aaron Williamson of Toronto, Jayce Lee of Taiwan, Sophia Lang of California—are collaborating to teach generative scribing workshops.

They just delivered one in Portland, Oregan and had some majorly experienced scribes onsite interested in broadening their practice. Check out some photos on Sophia Lang's Instagram.

Congrats, Kelvy. (And thank you!)

– Peter Durand

Join Dan Roam in San Francisco for 2 full days of visual thinking!

Pictures are our best tool for leadership, sales, training, communications, and problem-solving. Over the past 7 years, Dan's personally trained thousands of professionals like you to become master visual-thinkers. Now he'd like to invite you to join him in San Francisco for his full two-day training conference. Discover for yourself the problem-solving power of your own visual mind. This is your chance to experience the same training he's delivered at Microsoft, Google, Boeing, Gap, Siemens, Philips, the United States Senate, and the White House.

The workshop includes: 

• 16 hours of intense, hands-on visual training.
• Dan's new SHOW & TELL book.
• Dan's UNFOLDING THE NAPKIN workbook.
• Personal whiteboard, pen, & eraser.
• 2 excellent breakfasts and lunches.
• True insight, useful tools, & real-world exercises.

This two-day workshop normally costs $1,295, but if you sign up now (before May 15, 2015) you'll get $200 off!

Register now and save $200!

Summer Workshops with Grove Consultants in Berlin & San Francisco

Advanced Visual Facilitation with David Sibbet & Rachel Smith

For experienced visual practitioners. Deepen your facilitation skills and command of graphic frameworks.

San Francisco (3-day)
August 13-15, 2014
09:00-16:30 (9am-4:30pm)
$1,900

Berlin (2-day)
July 17-18, 2014
09:00-16:30 (9am-4:30pm)
$1,400 (USD)

Large-Scale Process Consulting & Design
For experienced visual practitioners. Grow your capacity to lead effective organization-change and social-change processes.

Gisela Wendling
San Francisco (3-day)
September 17-19, 2014
09:00-16:30 (9am-4:30pm)
$2,250

To register: Email [email protected] or call 1.415.561.6132.
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Visit The Grove's website for information about additional workshops, products and client services.

http://www.grove.com/site/wkshp.html

Making Visual Confectionary: Andrew Park at TEDxBermuda 2013

Andrew Park, owner of the hairy hand that illustrated the RSA Animate phenomenon, created this time-lapse scribing video to accompany his own TEDx Talk.

He tells the story of graduating from Art College and learning how to be a true artist through working for a group of accountants.

His main message: "Put artists to work!"

FacilitatorU: Feel the Fear and Facilitate Anyway

For the Halloween issue of FacilitatorU newsletter, the writers asked veteran facilitators to share with them their greatest fears (and those typically encountered by their groups) along with proposed coping strategies.

Common facilitation fears, include demonic voices in one's head, shouting:

• Careful not to inadvertently open a can of worms and stir up conflict!
• You do not understanding the culture!
• You will not know what to do!
• What if your mind goes blank from stage fright?
• You're ineffective in helping groups achieve their goals!
• You're not prepared!
• You might look silly, stupid, or worse… unprofessional!

Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

These are common and 100% sources of fear, the trick is learning how to manage these issues and emotions when they jump out and surprise you!

Read on for some sage advice on how to ward off these emotional bloodsuckers:
http://facilitatoru.com/blog/facilitation/feel-the-fear-and-facilitate-anyway

Posted via email from The Center for Graphic Facilitation

CNN Ideas Series: Sunni Brown on what we learn from doodles

LINK: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/01/opinion/brown-creativity-doodles/

CNN interview with Sunni Brown, speaker and co-author of "GameStorming: A Playbook for Rule-breakers, Innovators and Changemakers." She was recently named on Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business List and on the 10 Most Creative People on Twitter list. She spoke at the TED 2011 conference in Long Beach, California.

Posted via email from The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Major Sweet Hand: Typographic Inspiration from Carolyn Sewell

Take a look at these hand-drawn postcards by Carolyn Sewell. Colors, letters, lines and curls, I might just beg to be her peep.

via doodlersanonymous.com

As Graphic Recorders and Facilitators we are called to not just write neatly, but to render mind-seizing, heart-grasping images.

Sewell brings both together in her illustrative scriberdoodles.

Check out her sketchnotes to see how she employs this style of text-based graphic capture during lectures, presentation, and private journaling sessions: http://www.carolynsewell.com/#708078/Sketchnotes

Posted via email from The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Stellar Articles by Sunni Brown & Mike Rohde on A List Apart!

A List Apart : JANUARY 25, 2011

Respect the doodle. Use the power of visual thinking to create and share ideas.

The Miseducation of the Doodle by SUNNI BROWN

The teacher who chastised you for “mindless doodling” was wrong on both counts. Far from shutting down the mind, the act of doodling engages the brain in the kind of visual sense-making people have practiced for over 30,000 years. Doodling sharpens concentration, increases retention, and enhances access to the problem solving unconscious. It activates the portions of the visual cortex that allow us to see mental imagery and manipulate concepts, and unifies three major learning modalities—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Doodle Revolution leader Sunni Brown introduces strategic doodling and presents the ABCs of our shared visual alphabet.

Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool by MIKE ROHDE

You don’t have to be a great singer to write a great song—just ask Bob Dylan. Likewise, you needn’t be a Leonardo to draw your way to more and better ideas. Sketching helps you generate concepts quickly, exploring alternatives rapidly and at no cost of resources. The looseness of a sketch removes inhibitions, granting clients and colleagues permission to consider and challenge the ideas it represents. Mike Rohde outlines the practice, surveys the tools, and shares ways to become confident with this method of brainstorming, regardless of your level of artistic ability.

The Neuroscience of Improvisation

I have always wanted to have my brain scanned while listening and scribing. One limitation is that I'd have to lay immobilized on my back in a giant beige magnet. On a vacation a few years ago, I described what I do for a living to family friend who is a neuropathologist.

When I asked him what happens in my brain while I listen and draw images to capture ideas on large surfaces, he replied: "Why, your whole brain is lit up like a Christmas tree!"

Charles Limb is a doctor and a musician who researches the way musical creativity works in the brain. He wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation -- so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds.

Graphic Facilitation on NYTimes.com

From Jay Smethurst of Sente Corporation:

Caricaturing Economists

By JUSTIN WOLFERS

I was at the Legg Mason Thought Leader Forum last week, talking about my research over recent years on prediction markets.  It was good fun, but the real novelty was that as I was speaking — literally, in real time — there was a cartoonist next to the stage, cartooning my talk on a five-foot-wide poster.  I’ve never seen this before, but it was a real hit.

As a speaker, it can be hard to organize your own thoughts even when you know what is coming next.  And as an audience member, it can be harder still to sort out the key points a speaker makes from their conversational asides.  But the artist — Christopher Fuller who works for Sente Corporation— was just amazing.  He not only picked out the important analytic insights, but found an incredibly useful way to represent them, cartooning (or perhaps caricaturing) my message.

I think this is a great idea, and it will serve as a useful reminder to those who heard the talk.  And if you weren’t there, hopefully this cartoon gives you some sense of what I had to say.

Now if only I could get my MBA students to do the same thing, they would all have a wonderfully entertaining set of notes to study in advance of their exams.  I would love to see a study figuring out whether it helps them retain the material.  I bet it would.

via freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com